Free Upstream by Mary Oliver Page A

lyricism, sweetness, persuasion, the stress of rhetoric, the weight of catalog. The detail, the pace, the elaborations are both necessary and augmentative; this is a long poem and it is not an argument but a thousand examples, a thousand taps and twirls on Whitman’s primary statement. Brevity would have madethe whole thing ineffectual, for what Whitman is after is felt experience. Experience only, he understands, is the successful persuader.
    Logic and sermons never convince,
    The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul (p. 56)
    he says, and what would be prolongation or hyperbole in another man’s book is part of the earnest and necessary equipage here.
    The reader of
Leaves of Grass
, in this first section especially, is a major player, and is invited into this “theater of feeling” tenderly. “Song of Myself” is sprinkled with questions; toward the end of the poem they come thick and fast, their profusion, their slantness, their unanswerability helping the reader to rise out of familiar territory and into this soul-waking and world-shifting experience:
    Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much? (p. 28)
    What do you think has become of the young and old men? (p. 32)
    Who need be afraid of the merge? (p. 33)
    The souls moving along . . . are they invisiblewhile the least atom of the stones is visible? (p. 34)
    Oxen that rattle the yoke or halt in the shade, what is that you express in your eyes? (p. 37)
    What is a man anyhow? What am I? and what are you? (p. 45)
    Shall I pray? Shall I venerate and be ceremonious? (p. 45)
    And on and on. More than sixty questions in all, and not one of them easily answerable.
    Nor, indeed, are they presented for answers, but to force open the soul:
    Unscrew the locks from the doors!
    Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! (p. 50)
    â€œSong of Myself” presents Whitman’s invitation in a tone without margins—ecstasy, mysticism, urgency, seducements, open arms, and all those questions leave the reader plundered, exalted, and exhausted.
    _______
    And so, amazingly, begins the long descent. The eleven poems remaining are various in tone and intention. Incomparison with the sixty-two pages of “Song of Myself,” each is surprisingly brief. In each section the author of “Song of Myself” continues to speak, but more comfortably, less extensively, less urgently, and at an increasing emotional distance from us.
    Two of the poems are eleven pages long, another two are seven pages in length, the last seven are all four pages long or less. * If “The Sleepers” is almost palpably caressing, if “There Was a Child Went Forth” is flawlessly tender, if “A Boston Ballad” stands in its place with a surprising theatricality, still none of them measures anywhere near “Song of Myself,” with its thunder and its kisses and its implications. So hot is the fire of that poem, so bright its transformative power, that we truly need, and Whitman knew it, each of the slow, descending chords that follow. There is a madness born of too much light, and Whitman was not after madness nor even recklessness, but the tranquility of affinity and function. He was after a joyfulness, a belief in existence in which man’s inner light is neither rare nor elite, but godly and common, and acknowledged. For that it was necessary to be rooted, again, in the world.
3.
    One day as I wrestled with that long opening poem, the complaint burst from me: With Whitman it’s opera, opera, opera all the time! I shouted, in something very like weariness.
    It is true. For long stretches Whitman’s tone of summoning and import is unalleviated. But it is necessary to his purpose, which is so densely serious. Neither whimsy nor the detailed and opulent level of fun-terror, as Poe for example employs it, is found in Whitman. Poe understood the usefulness of entertainment and employed it,